


The Gold Room

by paper_dragons



Series: The Midas Touch [1]
Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Supernatural
Genre: Adventure, Destiel - Freeform, Fluff, M/M, Midas's daughter, My own character, Sabriel - Freeform, Sam sort of rescues her
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 04:10:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1414588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paper_dragons/pseuds/paper_dragons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Midas's daughter didn't turn to gold, but she does have the same power he did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the girl with the gold

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to do something with the Midas story for a long time. This happened.

There was a girl sitting in the gold room.

She was crying.

Her hair was the exact shade of gold in sunlight, her clothes suffering the same affliction. There were gloves on the floor, turned to a flexible, woven kind of gold, and she had her fists in balls. “Don’t come any closer.” The girl was pleading. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Sam stopped, a few feet away from the girl, and held up his hands in a sign of trust. “I don’t want to hurt you either.”

She stepped back from him, putting about six more inches between them. “I didn’t mean to. They made me take off the gloves at school and I—I couldn’t stop it. I can’t control it.”

Sam reached down and picked up the gloves. They were gold, without a doubt, but woven so they were soft and flexible. “This is beautiful,” he said, holding one up to the light. The girl heaved a sob and sat down heavily on a solid gold chair. “You’ve made beautiful things.”

She shook her head. “This is not beautiful.” She looked around at the few other children who were frozen in shades of gold. They looked confused or frightened mostly. “This is murder. I am a monster.”

Sam took a step closer and she rolled out of the chair, stepping back. “Stop. Don’t touch me,” she shrieked. “I don’t want to hurt anyone ever again.”

Sam shrugged off his jacket and tossed it to her. She caught it and he watched, fascinated, as the threads took on a golden color. She dropped it halfway through the process but it continued to change slowly in the absence of her touch, taking on the distinct shine of gold. “I can’t stop it,” she whispered, staring at the jacket with horror in her eyes.

When she caught Sam’s gaze again, however, it was one of wonder. “This is amazing,” he breathed. There was a moment of silence where Sam just stared at the jacket. “I’m Sam. I want to save you.”

After a long stretch of consideration, she spoke. “My name is Joan,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. Sam offered her the gloves. She shook her head. “Throw them. I don’t want to…” she held up her hands, fingers spread wide. “I don’t want to risk it.”

Sam tossed her the gloves and she caught them, slipping them on. “Put on the jacket too,” he suggested. She nodded and slid on the oversized, completely gold jacket. It was heavy but much warmer than the hard gold surface of the floor. “If you come with me, I will try to help you.”

Joan nodded. “Okay.” She followed Sam, her fists in balls, avoiding contact out of habit.


	2. gold in place of glass, gold in place of home

Joan sat on the bed that was already gold inside and out. “I’m sorry,” she said for the thousandth time. Sam just waved it off.

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s not like you gave yourself the Midas touch.”

The girl nodded, still visibly upset. She’d calmed down from her earlier hysterics at turning the mirror to solid gold, which was not nearly as reflective a surface.

(Sam had called Gabriel, who’d grinned at the kid, said a few words in Greek over a spray bottle, and washed the mirror in what he proudly proclaimed was the only thing capable of reversing the Midas touch. Sam had rolled his eyes and gotten a faceful of water in return and a demand that he apologize)

“You should get some sleep,” Sam suggested. Joan nodded, eyes red and puffy but no longer crying. “It’s been a long day.”

He was about to leave when he heard her voice. “That…the angel.”

“Gabriel?”

She nodded. “Did he—did the water work? On the other kids, from school.”

Sam smiled wide, glad to be the bearer of good news for once. “It did. They don’t remember anything that happened. They think you moved away.”

The fabric—the thin sheet of woven gold—made a slight crinkling noise as she balled it in her fist. “Good,” she said, absently. “That’s great.”

Sam flipped the light switch and closed the door quietly, leaving Joan alone with her thoughts.

XXX

When she opened her eyes she was horrified to find herself in complete darkness.

_I must have been sleepwalking_ , she thought. _I shouldn’t have taken the gloves off to sleep_.

She navigated with her hands in fists and her elbows in front of her. It stopped the gold from spreading further, and she managed to flick the switch with one of her elbows.

It was just as she thought. There were gold handprints on the walls— _at least they aren’t spreading_ , she thought. _Thank God for small miracles_.

The window was the worst. It was completely gold, all the way through. As she fumbled with the gloves, she glanced around in a search for the water bottle, spraying it on the square sheet of gold in the windowpane. It became translucent immediately and slowly transitioned back to glass.

She wiped a trail through the water on the glass with her gloved pinky finger and choked on a scream. Where the water soaked through the glove it felt like it was boiling.

“Sam!” She bit her tongue, knowing that she shouldn’t wake him for something stupid she’d done.

Still, it was a selfish relief to hear the clatter and loud footsteps as he ran down the hall. “What?” he said, looking around quickly.

She held out her hand. “I’m sorry. I just—I touched the water and it burned me.”

He instructed her to take off the glove, but when she did there was no mark. “It—I can feel it. It feels like a burn,” she said, staring at the unmarked flesh.

“I’ll ask Gabriel about it,” Sam said. He sounded awake but looked exhausted.

Joan swallowed hard, embarrassed, and nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”

Sam shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

When the door shut behind him, Joan stared at the offended finger. She pulled the glove back on and turned the light off, crawling into bed again and falling asleep promptly, the hand with the phantom burn extended to keep the pain, real or imagined, at bay.

She slept to the tune of moonlight pouring through the window.

As she drifted off, a boy many miles away dreamt for the hundred thousandth time of drowning and not dying.


	3. mirror mirror

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure about this chapter but I'm not sure how to fix it. So hopefully it's tolerable.

It seems appropriate now to tell you about Joan.

When she was nine she fell asleep a girl in Greece. Her father, Midas, cursed himself, unsure of what he was getting into. She fell asleep a real girl and woke up with the same curse as Midas, hair silky and golden, catching the sun and seeming to hold it, eyes more gold than seemed natural.

When her father washed himself clean in the river he didn’t know about her curse, and then—then she ran away with another god.

He took her as far as a century could take her, and she was surprised he stuck around that long. Janus, god of choices, chose her for a hundred years. That is love. That is the only kind of love that mattered to her.

When he left she kept going. Gold, as it turned out, is quite valuable. Instead of turning herself into a wealthy princess, she ran away from her own power.

She lived with gloves and did not touch anything if she could help it.

She stopped aging at fifteen but she kept running, staring into mirrors and trying to forget that she had a father, a father who knew exactly what she was doing. If he wanted she knew he could find her. Stories about girls with gold who run away at a hint of contact—those are the kinds of stories that ripple through space and not time. Everyone in a single generation would know of her, but they did not think to tell their children.

She learned to hide as time went on.

She fell asleep at the bottom of rivers before anyone could think to value the gold there. She slept in caves and trailed her fingers over the walls, leaving gold in veins as the stone collapsed in her wake. She pawned off the gold she created and kept going.

When she was fifteen-but-really-thousands of years old, she fell asleep looking into a mirror and woke up looking at gold.

It was thousands of years between the first person she touched, the first she ever turned to gold, and the last. The sky bent and broke like some strange kind of glass and rained down around her that second time as though Atlas had walked away.

She’d sworn she wouldn’t ever so that again.

Joan fell asleep looking into a mirror and woke up looking at a sheet of gold and recognized the metaphor there.

Anything and anyone she touched would look beautiful to the rest of the world and horrifying to her.

She put on the gloves then and ran away, tried to find somewhere she could hide, tried to gain some semblance of control over her power, and when she was confident in her ability to hide it she stepped into real life, always wearing the gloves.

Then, one day, the teacher had told her to hold out her hands and had removed the gloves. She hadn’t even had a chance to speak before the gold had started, sparking between their fingertips and spreading like fire. When she screamed people tried to grab her, to soothe her, and _it was an accident_.

And then a man appeared, a silhouette in the doorway telling her that it was okay, that her power was more than a curse, that it was beautiful and that she would be okay. _She would be okay_ , he said, and for the first time she believed in somebody.

It was almost like she could see Janus there in retrospect, laying out the potential paths and whispering to her, _Which are you going to take_?

She took the gloves, stood up, followed the man. Janus, she supposed, would approve of the boldness of that decision.

In fact, as she left the room and its gold sheen in her past, Janus stood in her wake as he so often did. Before the arrival of the archangel and after the departure of the girl and the hunter, he stayed to look at the golden faces of the people she had never meant to hurt, because with her it would always be about control.

In the moment before the runaway angel arrived he disappeared, taking a gold book from the room as a souvenir. He left no trace of his presence.


End file.
